In the late 1980s and 1990s, skateboard teams harnessed inexpensive, widely accessible video equipment to record and share limit-pushing tricks. Featuring skaters traversing stairs, benches, and other skate-able elements of public architecture, such videos assembled grainy footage of bodies in flight into music-driven montages.

These high-energy VHS-format videos, shot with limited budgets on consumer-accessible cameras equipped with genre-defining fish-eye lenses, were circulated among skaters and sold in skate shops. They served as inspiration and instruction, a form of proto social media that bound together an avid, expanding skater community. Soon, skating and the way it was captured on video became inextricably linked, complementary forms of artistic expression.

Recording the Ride features videos and artifacts from skate culture’s formative years, with a focus on releases by H-Street, Plan B, World Industries, Girl, Zoo York, 411, Birdhouse, and others that manifest the structure and style that defined the modern skate video genre. Highlights include artifacts from the production of The Bones Brigade Video Show (1984); a focus on Mike Ternasky and the brand Plan B, with vintage production and post-production artifacts used in the making of their seminal releases The Questionable Video (1992) and Virtual Reality (1993); and behind-the-scenes images, including photos shot by Spike Jonze—whose filmmaking career began with the production of skate videos—on the set of Video Days (1991). Period skateboard decks link the spirit and aesthetic established in these videos to the emergence of 1990s skater-owned brands.

Organized by guest curators Jacob Rosenberg and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs Barbara Miller, and Director of Exhibition Management and Design Dánae Colomer.

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